[CentOS] detecting boot order

Sat Aug 30 06:09:44 UTC 2008
Richard Karhuse <rkarhuse at gmail.com>

On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 1:58 PM, Mark Belanger <mark_belanger at ltx.com>wrote:

> Given that I have a machine with possibly multiple disks, each of
> which is bootable(has an MBR)....
>
> Is there a command that will query the BIOS and tell me which disk
> is the default boot disk.  BTW - this is x86.
>
> The goal is to remotely reboot the workstation into the desired
> disk(which contain different centos versions).
>
> tia,
>
> -Mark
>

Just a thought ...

Check-out kexec and possibly grub.exe.

What you can do is build a RAM disk with grub.exe as the
kernel and boot it with command line options that will boot
any of your other disks.  Kind of "neat" ....

I use it as part of anaconda / kickstart to re-flash the BIOS
by booting up a DOS system (when flashrom does not [yet]
work) and then boot back into the kickstart.

Unfortunately, kexec really only works in fairly recent
kernels, however.  So, that may be an issue for you.

  -rak-
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